ps238principal: Classic sci-fi is disappointed in us, too...

ps238principal (

ps238principal) wrote,
@ 2008-05-07 13:46:00

Entry tags:

dc, doctor who, g.i. joe, international, marvel, science fiction for dummies

Classic sci-fi is disappointed in us, too...

I'm re-reading the Arthur C. Clarke "Rama" series, in which humanity has an encounter with an advanced alien ship, whose purpose is revealed over the course of several novels. I was a voracious reader of Asimov, Bova, Ellison, ("What about Ray Bradbury?" "I'm aware of his work.") and so on, and as I grew older and technology got more advanced, it became harder to relate to the "future" portrayed in much of the golden age of sci-fi. These novels had galactic empires that ran on tape recordings, where paper was the primary means of information dissemination, and computers were still larger than cars. Some readers are turned off by that kind of thing, but what gets to me is how dumb I appear in comparison to the casts of these stories.

Let me explain: the characters in these tales, even children, are usually way smarter than me. They can do orbital mechanics in their heads, spout equations at will, and recite Shakespeare as readily as I can quote "Office Space." They can generate mathematical languages to communicate with alien races, navigate legal loopholes in offworld laws, and still find time to exchange pleasure-nodes with the Violet Queen of Mammarite D (who is a very nice person, I hear) as they explain the physics of solar radiation.

I'm sure a lot of it had to do with the authors often having a background in science; you write what you know. In the aforementioned "Rama" series, I can only think of two characters that weren't book-smart (one was a crewmember of the Newton spaceship, and the other was a child with a mental handicap). Even a reporter who came with the crew of a ship to cover events was able to quickly learn how to function as an engineer. I can barely do math without my cell phone or "calculator.exe" handy. Some might say that a page describing the geometry of a spaceship's course is boring. To me, it's a reminder I'm lucky I can still remember how to do "long divison." I love seeing smart and professional people do their jobs in my fiction, don't get me wrong. I can even imagine myself saving a spaceship from plummeting into a black hole... until the author has the hero solving the problem and "showing his work." Maybe that's why I like the answer to everything being 42. :)

In other sci-fi schtuff, last week's first-run UK episode of Doctor Who wrapped up a very satisfying two-parter. Classic who-fans got an old villain to enjoy, as well as the mention of another one (harkening back to some old continuity! Yay!). The teaser for next week is compelling, but I REALLY hope it's not mis-handled by the writers. Battlestar Galactica continues to both advance yet seemingly stay in one place at the same time. Not that it isn't enjoyable, but I'm hoping for a little forward motion towards a blue-green planet called "Earth."

Many of you lucky people have seen "Iron Man." Even if you haven't (like some poor sods that look a lot like me), this little gem from the "I'm a Marvel, I'm a DC" series should raise a grin. His promo for MvDC's season two is a great send-up for all of us that like to laugh at the "buddy cop" genre. I can't wait to see what else is in store.

Another side note about the upcoming G.I. Joe film, regarding the "international" flavor: Joe went international a while ago, it seems. I wonder if any of the Joe code-names changed when they sent the show overseas? Were any of them even more ridiculous-sounding in Europe?

Cristi and I are Seattle-bound for this weekend's Emerald City Comicon. I should have net access (at least in the evenings) unless my rusty ol' laptop is incompatable with local routers (I've had that happen more and more lately. 5 years is, like 500 in laptop years, so I figure I've gotten some good milage out of it). I plan on taking some snapshots and perhaps a little video, if time allows. We'll see you there!

The madness of linKing George:

- We've got lots of games this week, so let's hop in with Chronotron, a game that requires that you play the game with your past selves. Doctor Who "paradox" fans should dig this one.
- 8-bit dinos try to outrun "doom" from an asteroid in Dino Run. You can get points for "doom surfing" on the edge of the blast-cloud, but it's easy to trip up, too...
- The site is in Portuguese, and it's a little slow, but scroll down for a really nice flash-based hero-maker. It's very "Paul Dini"-esque.
- Back to the games, and this one is a strategy favorite: Proximity is a kind of Risk game mixed with Go. Give it a try, and watch the hours whiz past...
- An oldie from the depths of the internet (at least, it looks like it's been a while given the banner ad at the top), The Happy Poster Project has some printables that will look nice and confusing in any office, I think.
- Finally, let's all relax with some Diet Coke and Mentos... at 1200 frames per second. Ahhhh...

(Post a new comment)

frustratedpilot
2008-05-08 03:52 am UTC (link)

The 1980s version of the G.I. Joe toy was a product of Trans-Atlantic cross-pollenation. Palitoy, which was the maker of the British parallel to the "big Joe", "Action Man", was also the British license-maker of the Star Wars action figures. Once the end was in sight for Star Wars the first time around, Palitoy decided to reverse-engineer their own "Action Man" derivative in Star Wars scale--Action Force! From this Hasbro got the idea for the "small Joe", and there was even some sharing of molds on both sides of the ocean.

Quarrel -> Scarlett
Red Laser -> Cobra Commander
Gung Ho -> Gaucho (they explained the tattoo as being the Mexican eagle!)

There is a website called "Blood For The Baron" which collects not only the British Marvel (with the approval of Hasbro) run of the comics, but also the pre-Hasbro Battle Action Force (by IPC Magazines) with a completely different cast and enemy.

Another thing about Action Force...The IPC ones were even bloodier than the Larry Hama Marvel ones, at least till Cobra came along...then they devolved into a slapstick more like the TV cartoons. The Marvel UK ones were interesting and different...but not particularly well handled artisticly (IMO).

I noticed early on in the IPC Action Force that if a character was code-named after a food item, he was cannon fodder and likely to be killed off.
{STALKER: So who's assigned to my squad on this mission?
GEN. HAWK: Big Mac, Whopper, Wimpy, Big Boy, Jack-in-the-Box, Drumstick, Barbecue and Haggis.
STALKER: *sigh*}

Find out more at Blood For The Baron.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

ps238principal
2008-05-08 07:32 pm UTC (link)

Wow. I didn't know it had so much history! And more villains with masks/helmets!

And COBRA was pretty hokey over here, and only got moreso. I think the high point a lot of people remember is a scene where balloons with Cobra Commander's mask on them fell on a couple of Joes, and released gas that made them think they were being attacked by snakes.

The accents in the cartoon were also a riot. It also seemed to be a law somewhere that GI Joe had to cross over with Transformers on at least one occasion per media series (although not actually naming Cobra Commander in the Transformers cartoon was a nice geek moment).

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2008-05-09 01:19 am UTC (link)
	Found a bit o interesting news both GIJOE and Who related: guess who's playing Destro? http://io9.com/388639/first-look-at-christopher-eccleston-in-gi-joe (Reply to this)(Parent)

	shlabam 2008-05-08 03:52 am UTC (link)
	Yes! A "BANG!" strip! And you avoided the obvious tie-in to the shape of the container. Well done, sir. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	ps238principal 2008-05-08 07:33 pm UTC (link)
	It was a great time playing that game; and the only mention of the container came from a player who was upset that the bullet was anachronistic to the time period. :) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	spotweld 2008-05-08 03:54 am UTC (link)
	Speaking of Risk-like games, have you seen the Doctor Who version that's up on the BBC site? (Cyber Assault) Good luck surviving the ComiCon. (Reply to this)

	frustratedpilot 2008-05-08 04:14 am UTC (link)
	Are the Nodwick pages out of order? This one doesn't make sense after the one preceding it. :/ (Reply to this)(Thread)

	spotweld 2008-05-08 05:18 am UTC (link)
	New chapter, I think. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	codeguyj 2008-05-08 05:51 am UTC (link)
	I agree. I think the previous chapter is missing a page or two. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ps238principal 2008-05-08 07:33 pm UTC (link)
	I will delve in and repair it today. Sorry, folks! (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	codeguyj 2008-05-09 06:13 pm UTC (link)
	Much better. Thanks. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	(Anonymous) 2008-05-12 09:34 pm UTC (link)
	It's sense-making now. Thanks - I'm too lazy to go delve through my old issues. Umm, I mean, I don't want to risk damaging my old issues by rifling through them for the missing pages. (Reply to this)(Parent)

Rama-fest

codeguyj
2008-05-08 04:32 am UTC (link)

The first book in the series, Rendezvous with Rama, was great. It was the kind of sci-fi I loved as a kid and into high school. It had lots of hard science and interesting ideas.

The rest of the books were crap.

Well, not exactly crap, but let me explain. Clarke had a co-author for the sequels, Gentry Lee. Before I read Rama II I had already read the first book they did together, which was called Cradle. Cradle was a decent book. It had a lot more character stuff and intrigue than Clarke's solo books. Some of the characters were a strong female protagonist, a psychotic woman who directly opposed her, and an aging military man who was strongly religious but having a crisis of faith.

Do those descriptions sound familiar? They also perfectly describe several of the characters in the Rama sequels. So while the first book was hard sci-fi, the sequels were rehashes of a melodrama that I'd already read.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	Re: Rama-fest ffutures 2008-05-08 10:35 am UTC (link)
	Glad it wasn't just me. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Rama-fest ps238principal 2008-05-08 07:34 pm UTC (link)
	I'm on Rama III, and we're about to have the "colonists" meet up (the convicts vs. the civilians). Is the rest of the book and Rama IV going to be a disappointment? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	Re: Rama-fest codeguyj 2008-05-08 10:13 pm UTC (link)
	It's been too long since I read them for me to remember if I liked the ending better or worse than the rest. I didn't read the fourth book. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	kevinbunny 2008-05-08 09:01 am UTC (link)
	Since I know he likes them... WOOT OFFF! (Reply to this)(Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2008-05-08 02:08 pm UTC (link)
	Wooooooooot! He's not the only one, so thanks. -JT (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ps238principal 2008-05-08 07:35 pm UTC (link)
	Oh, they were SO mean at the beginning of the woot-off. They re-ran that battery thing from April 1, and then re-posted it as the second item as if the joke was still going on. Darn you to heck, Woot! :) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	styfen 2008-05-08 11:04 am UTC (link)
	That Hero generator is pretty fantastic, even unfinished it's got a lot of variation and options within it. When I can construct a superhero who has one angelic wing and one technological one with it I'm bound to be impressed. I can pretty much create pictures of every single supervillain and hero in our Mutants and Masterminds campaign now. Which is fantastic news! (Reply to this)(Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2008-05-11 04:31 am UTC (link)
	You might want to give this one a shot, too. Plenty of variety and in English, to boot. http://www.ugo.com/channels/comics/heroMachine2/ (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	styfen 2008-05-11 08:23 am UTC (link)
	I've seen that one before. I really don't like the artist style of it. (Reply to this)(Parent)

Smart Folks in Sci-Fi
(Anonymous)
2008-05-08 01:58 pm UTC (link)

"Let me explain: the characters in these tales, even children, are usually way smarter than me. They can do orbital mechanics in their heads, spout equations at will, and recite Shakespeare as readily as I can quote "Office Space."

I think that has alot to do with the changeing knowledge base and the corresponding shift in education that was going on in these authors' salad days. In the sixties, high school kids were learning about the proton, neutron and electron as part of advanced physics courses, which seemed utterly amazing to Depression era parents. Now kids are encountering these basic points as early as elementary school. Even today, my child's biology education in the third grade involved the amount of detail that I don't remember encountering until the fifth and sixth grades. What's he going to learn about in high school? Nuclear medicine?

Heck, a really hyper parent can work with a really crazy school to crank out a prodigy who learns what a dodecahedron is in his kindergarten shapes class, plays Liszt on the piano by the time he's out of the fifth grade, puts Euclidian geometry behind him before the eighth grade, heads to college at sixteen, and succombs to drugs and stress in a fabulous burnout before grad school. Okay, the sci-fi writers never saw that last one coming, but they got the rest right - for every young "Child Left Behind", there's one kid on the "regular track" whose curriculum outstrips his parents and one wunderkind who can handle both calculus and classical music but feels depressingly average next to the fellow overachievers in his Vanguard class. And yeah, that creates classes of people who don't often encounter someone who's not exactly as "smart" or "dumb" as them. Assuming that the latter two groups of people make up a group we call "Those Most Likely to Go Into Space," then maybe those old authors weren't really going too far out on a limb in their character creation.

Or maybe they just only knew how to write one character well. What do I know?

-JT

(Reply to this)(Thread)

Re: Smart Folks in Sci-Fi
(Anonymous)
2008-05-08 03:58 pm UTC (link)

I agree with JT. In 1972 of the very first Rendezvous with Ranma, you can see the 60's culture effect on the story as to what the future would be like. People were smarter, but they had more permissive and "progressive" (for lack of a better word) ideas of cultural ideaology such as the captain having two wives.

In the second book and later series written some 17 years later by Clarke and Lee definitely have a different culture of how everyone is super-smart and that the paradigm of shifting education and the power of technology can offer that boost. Add in some scientific genetic augmentation or superior breeding coupled with training (as like a Mentat in Dune), then you'll have people with 180 IQ's running around in no time in pretty much all our sci-fi books.

I thought Rama was a truly awesome series.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

(Anonymous)
2008-05-08 06:34 pm UTC (link)

I am the same way. The Golden Age of Sci-Fi is my favorite era to read from.

Robert A. Heinlein is my favorite of the bunch, but definately Arthur C. Clarke and Issac Asmiov are must reads.

Outside of the golden age, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle work well together when they co-author stories. I have enjoyed every one of them.

Spyder Robinson did a piece (co-authored by Heinlein) called Variable Star, which was fantastically done, IMO.

(Reply to this)(Thread)

	ps238principal 2008-05-08 07:36 pm UTC (link)
	I've also got a soft spot for Pohl's "Gateway" series, which is kind of Rama-esque with humans mucking about with alien technology. (Reply to this)(Parent)

Batman
(Anonymous)
2008-05-09 01:30 am UTC (link)

I don't know if you heard about it yet, but their gonna have 2 villians in the new batman flick: Joker AND Two-face. This time around they actually make him look like a severe burn victim. I just hope they don't fall into the old franchise's habit of adding in an extra villian/hero with each new release, though a Hush movie would be interesting.....

http://www.iheartchaos.com/2008/05/07/two-face-in-the-dark-knight-revealed-and-boy-is-he-nasty-looking-i-heart-movies/

(Reply to this)

	agent_23 2008-05-09 02:49 am UTC (link)
	That Casio EX-F1 that they used for those Diet Coke/Mentos shots is on special at a local department store. I would so get one but the price is still steep. But it shows a lot of promise with what they can do for other cameras following it. (Reply to this)

pfogg
2008-05-09 10:48 am UTC (link)

I never really minded stories about people with improbable abilities -- I suppose that's why I could enjoy superhero comics -- and the part of an SF story where the heroes 'showed their work' was kind of like the toy surprise in the cereal box. If the authors worked things out properly, I (more or less) forgave them having their characters pull off in a few hours of 'ticking clock' a solution that would more plausibly require a week spent at a desk with calculation aids and piles of reference material. It was fun to look things up, check the work, and track down any literary references they'd toss out along the way.

Mind you, Heinlein's tendency to have characters play chess without a chessboard seemed a bit over the top.

I don't recall Clarke going too far with this sort of thing, though. I suppose he favors intelligent, educated, science-and-engineering types as characters, since he's familiar with such people, and they're convenient choices for SF plotting and exposition, but I can't think of any case where he took that to an extreme. I skipped most of his later collaboration/sequel work, though

(Reply to this)

	re: Chronotron (Anonymous) 2008-05-10 06:24 am UTC (link)
	There's a game that some friends of mine have been working on that has some similarities to Chronotron. The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom http://www.winterbottomgame.com (Reply to this)

	falsechaos 2008-05-10 08:20 am UTC (link)
	As if creating such a delightful and witty superhero comic wasn't enough, you just have to go and casually toss a link to what has to be one of the best superhero generators I have ever seen online. Thank you. :3 (Reply to this)

	daibhid_c 2008-05-10 05:03 pm UTC (link)
	In other sci-fi schtuff, last week's first-run UK episode of Doctor Who wrapped up a very satisfying two-parter. Classic who-fans got an old villain to enjoy, as well as the mention of another one (harkening back to some old continuity! Yay!) Don't forger the reference to "Sir Alistair"! (Reply to this)(Thread)

	(Anonymous) 2008-05-12 09:30 pm UTC (link)
	"Don't forger the reference to "Sir Alistair"! The producers are referencing the heck out of him, and the references are getting more specific. Still, I wonder if Russell T. Davis is just a big, fat tease. -JT (Reply to this)(Parent)

Action force.
(Anonymous)
2008-05-11 10:14 am UTC (link)

I was in the UK around 1985 and I got a few action force comics (which I discovered years later was GI Joe). They didn't ahve individual characters, it was all space trooper and Mutant trooper etc. I don't know how graphic GI Joe was but the action force comics were quite graphic. In one a car comes up to a couple on the street and ask if the bloke is the local head of action force. When he says yes, they gun him down. His replacement turns out to be one of the gunmen who turns on them. They then take over London and when two contruction workers rush them they gun them down. In another it covers a group of Red Shadows, the former followers of Baron Blood ,who he betrayed when he turned into Cobra Commander. Think Cobra grunts but with full face helmets, and red not blue.

(Reply to this)

	celedraug 2008-05-12 08:16 pm UTC (link)
	Enjoyed getting to meet you at Emerald City Comic Con this weekend. (I was the gal running around as Rogue with Gambit.) Told another friend you were there and he had plans to go Sunday just because you were there. (Reply to this)

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